Innovative Content

Graham Bell opened a new era in communication when he around 1875 transformed sound waves into electrical signals which were amplified and replayed remotely by means of a loudspeaker. Then in 1925 John Logie Baird transformed visual information into electrical signals that could be replayed to a remote display monitor.
The communications industry as we know it today is founded on the development of these technologies and miniaturization of computer systems.

But up to year 2003 telecom equipment has only been able to transmit two of our senses:
seeing and hearing. However, when we examine objects and surfaces in the real world, our sense of feeling (touch)
is as important as seeing and hearing. Normally we use all of our senses in continuous and parallel cooperation to observe, orientate, learn and receive information. The most important combination of our senses are seeing, hearing
and feeling.

For many tasks feeling provides vital information to the operator, such as situations with poor lighting conditions
and jobs where details are so small that they are covered by the hands and tools that do the job.
An example may illustrate this: Modern surgical robot equipment is still operated by doctors, who have to do
their job without the sense of feeling since the robots do not have the ability to pick up and replay this touch
information. Currently, doctors only receive visual (camera) information and in some cases "force feedback"
when they attempt to access "out-of-bounds" areas.

When using computers and software for modelling processes and analysing complex systems, we often need
more than the 2 dimensions we can present on a display, even when using colours and shades. Techniques for
visual representation of the 3rd dimension have been introduced but are still lacking in their presentation of the
"real world". Here also the touch channel could provide significant additional information.

CompuTouch has now followed-up the inventions of Bell and Baird in being the first to present a device that can
transmit higher frequency, meaningful and understandable tactile information to the user. Just as a
loudspeaker or earphone can reproduce sound and a display can reproduce pictures, a small "tactile motor"
can reproduce 3-dimensional contours and topography of a surface based upon either input from sensors
or mathematical calculations. It also provides a mechanism for "exploring" complex 3D or even 4D virtual surfaces
as are found in geological and metrological data.

In the "real world" we can move our fingertips over the surface of an object.
Now we can place our fingertips on the surfaces of small tactile motors, and move our hand to feel the topography,
contours and structure of remote or virtual objects replayed by the tactile motors. The frequency response
of the CompuTouch tactile motor exceeds our ability to feel high-frequency vibrations of a surface. The tactile
signals  can therefore be used to present real-time contour and texture information.

So far we have only described how a tactile motor maybe used to present virtual topographical information, but we
are also able to interpret tactile information, be it a "texture" or a recognisable movement pattern. For many years
the blind have used Braille to recognise "alphabetic characters" and so "read" information. Why not develop a
haptic alphabet for the blind to read computer text directly, and with switches under the same tactile motors to
"type" text? But more generally it is relevant to associate a limited number of distinct "movement patters" to context related  information, regardless of a national language. To inform a driver to turn right or left or slow down, or an equipment operator the current position of a switch, all without moving his eyes from the job at hand.

The CompuTouch tactile motors actually are so small they can be built into gloves, switches, actuators, steering
wheels for cars etc., or they can be built into computer input pointing tools like a mouse or joy-stick, for
man-computer communication. Built into actuators or switches, the tactile motors can be used to give meaningful operational feedback to the operator, or built into gloves to touch 3D virtual objects. For the visually impaired a
mouse like hand pad could be a mouse, keyboard, Braille list and tactile screen all in one and at a much lower cost.

The tactile signals may either come from sensors mounted on or inside a remote robot arm – or the signals may
come from a virtual model of any surface (volume) where there exist various kinds of concentrations or fields
(radioactive, magnetic, temperature, pressure, velocity etc.).

In this way we can "feel" both scalar as well as vector information in addition to the contour and texture
of a surface.

Hans Steller
Managing director